‘How could you support anyone’s daughter entering this environment?’
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The terrible one-year anniversary of Gamergate is nearly here, and the women that make your games are war-weary, exhausted by a cultural battle that we never asked for. We are professionals trying to do our job, screamed at by children who don’t want girls in their clubhouse.

Elizabeth Sampat is one of these professionals. She’s a game designer at PopCap, one of the most successful studios in the world. In the aftermath of Gamergate, she’s struggling with an ethical dilemma. She’s uncomfortable asking girls to enter the game industry, knowing the abuse they will inevitably face. “I will no longer participate in encouraging young women and girls to become game industry professionals,” wrote Sampat in a popular Facebook post. “I will continue to fight tooth and nail for every woman who is currently here. But until the industry and gaming culture improves, it’s unethical.”

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I understand where Sampat is coming from. Someone just emailed me their fantasy about mutilating my genitals, and murdering me by slicing my body in half. It’s something they clearly spent a lot of time writing. Reading it, I should probably feel something – fear, anger or even exhaustion. But these threats have happened so often, I just feel nothing. How could you support anyone’s daughter entering this environment?

What does this kind of abuse mean for women like myself that work in the industry? Well, it’s like the zombie apocalypse all day every day, but one hosted on social media and comment platforms. Imagining themselves as noble warriors and not angry misogynists, they bang on the doors and windows, moaning about the Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) that have taken over their video games. Inevitably, when this is published, the comments below this article will follow the same pattern.

This online warfare is the only weapon those involved in Gamergate have, because they can’t compete with their sexist ideas and incoherent philosophy. Their battle to scrub their Wikipedia entry exemplifies this, as they seek to whitewash the Gamergate page of its sexist roots while attempting to delete, edit, and vandalise my page and those of other high-profile women. You know you’ve lost when your only resort is a comment section.

And yet, Gamergate isn’t the real problem facing women in games. In software engineering, we have the term “technical debt”. When you don’t do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve. The videogame industry has massive “sexism debt”, interest accrued for problems unaddressed for the last 30 years.

The battle is shifting from Gamergate to the wider issues facing women in tech, the sexism debt that must be addressed

Gamergate isn’t the problem – it’s a symptom of an industry that is deeply sexist and unable to understand it.

One of the strangest events of the last year was having a Law and Order episode made about Gamergate. The main character is a fictional composite of Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and me. “Women in gaming. What did I expect?” she says darkly, just before she quits the industry.

I think of that scene every day. Just what did I expect, standing up to Gamergate and trying to raise awareness of gamedev’s inclusivity problem? A warm welcome? I got into the game industry to make games, not to be a feminist critic. My biggest fear is that in five years, I might still be talking about my gender and not the games I make. Recently, I spent an entire day reporting 17 separate death threats. The week before, my private number was shared online – a form of internet abuse known as doxing – and someone called my phone while masturbating. I just hung up and went back to work. I try to find the dark humour where I can.

The women of the industry are surviving this cultural war in different ways. A common tactic I see is staying out of the media, hoping to not get noticed by the Gamergate mob. I have a friend who used to have one of the most high-profile shows for women gamers. She told me the other day that she was scared to reboot it, because Gamergate has a reputation for going after people’s children.

Another friend says she effects her company like a magnet, gently pulling them toward greater inclusivity. Another has a corporate edict to not discuss women’s equality in her public role. Another was warned by her colleagues that discussing women in games was like discussing religion in the workplace, and she decided to push back by standing up and speaking her truth.

For me, the battle is shifting from Gamergate to the wider issues facing women in tech, the sexism debt that must be addressed. Sampat is completely correct that the culture of the game industry must change, and it’s time to talk less about death threats and more about changes in the professional sphere. I want to make it better for young women by making it better for us now.

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In some ways, the real damage of Gamergate is pushing the public’s idea of sexism so far to the extreme, that changes in the professional sphere seem unimportant. In the 80s, gender-based harassment was getting hit on at work. The 2015 version, having armed Swat teams sent to your house in a false hostage threat, make that seem almost quaint.

The truth is, the sexist behaviour that really holds women in games back doesn’t come from the moustache-twirling cartoon villains of Gamergate. It’s the sexist hiring practices of our journalistic institutions. It’s the consistently over-sexualised designs we see. It’s the entitled male-player base that screams from the hills at the smallest inclusions of women. We need the male professionals in our field to understand the unconscious bias that they consistently show against women – yet they sleep peacefully at night, assured that the real troublemakers are the ones sending us death threats.

I was at a bar a few weeks ago having drinks with a well-known journalist in our field. “Do you think my career is going to be defined by Gamergate?” I asked him, worriedly. He looked me dead in the eye and said: “I think it depends on if you can pivot. At some point, you need to use your raised profile to move on to do new things.”

I’m taking that advice and pivoting. I’m sure the misogynist fringe of Gamergate will continue to make our lives hell in any way they can. They’ll continue to threaten me and other women, intimidate and bully us – but at a certain point, you just have to get back to work. Besides, we make games. They make internet comments. Who really has the power?